T1 – Using Productivity Tools For Business Development

Transcript

Curation is a relatively new business activity which entails searching the web for information, tools or techniques that your stakeholders would find useful, interesting or amusing. Effectively it’s a way to add real value to people who are important to you. Pearltrees and Diigo are 2 curation tools that allow you to hold various websites for a later date in an organised manner so that you can find them with ease when you need them.

Diigo is a Tag based curation site that allows you to make searchable lists. You can also make your diigo lists public so that others can see them. In order to use Diigo you first need to download the diigolet, this is a bookmark which you use to save your websites, simply go to https://www.diigo.com/tools/diigolet to add it. To use diigo you should first find a website that you wish to save, then select the diigolet. You will then see that there are functionality options available that you can find out more about in the Diigo help centre, I am going to focus on the Bookmark. When you select bookmark you will see the option to make the bookmark public or private, you can also mark things as unread if you wish to save them for later. It is also possible to tweet out the site from diigo, we would recommend you don’t do this, instead bookmark it for later and tweet it out at a more appropriate time either from twitter or a third party website such as Hootsuite. Then you can add a description of the website so that you can easily remember what it is about. Below the description are where you enter the tags, Diigo automatically analyse the page content and recommend suitable tags for you. Just point and click, and/or enter your own descriptive tags, separated by a space. Then click on ‘Save Bookmark’

You will then be able to go to your library on diigo and search for any tag you wish, in this instance let’s search for ‘Quotes’. As you can see, in this instance I can just click on the most popular tags, if the tag in looking for isn’t in that list I can just type into the search box, and you will see all of the sites I have bookmarked with that tag appear.

The other curation tool you can use is Pearltrees, this is a mind map based tool which uses branching. Pearltrees is automatically public, you will have to upgrade to the paid account in order to have private pearls. To use Pearltrees you can down load the pearler by going to the drop down on the left hand side of the screen and going to ‘Pearl from Browser’. From here you can simply go to whatever page you wish to save, select the pearler and simply add it to whichever branch you wish. You can also add additional ‘trees’ from here. To then find your website you can either simply follow the branch to find it, or, you can search based on keywords to find it either on the whole of Pearltrees or just within your own account.

For example let’s say that our CRM system has told me that my contact regime for Melanie suggests that I need to contact her as we haven’t spoken in 3 months. Using the Meta data or Fat CRM data that I have on my CRM system I know that Melanie is very interested in social media and LinkedIn in particular. So I am going to go to Diigo search for LinkedIn Google+, I can then use this to find a suitable article to email over to Melanie. This will strengthen my relationship with her as not only have I contacted her for something other than asking for work, I have also added value to her because I sent her something I know she will like. I also need to send out an update to LinkedIn, so I will go to Pearltrees, follow my branching until I get to blogging and then go to LinkedIn to create a status update and I have now created a status update to keep myself at the forefront of my stakeholders minds but I have also offered them some really interesting information around my field of expertise, further reinforcing my central message that I know what I am talking about.

Using curation tools such as Pearltrees and diigo make it so much easier to save and find information that you can use to develop and strengthen your relationships with your stakeholders without having to spend lots of time doing it.